Comment by sherburt3
15 hours ago
Really is heartbreaking that the click wheel is such an incredible and satisfying user interface but technology has evolved such that we have no need for it anymore.
15 hours ago
Really is heartbreaking that the click wheel is such an incredible and satisfying user interface but technology has evolved such that we have no need for it anymore.
We do still need it. Any time to need to scroll through any extremely long list in order to find a single particular item, the scroll wheel beats the manual binary search of scrollscrollscroll... too far... scrollscrollscroll back... too far... etc.
I would, unironically, use a device that had that iPod interface as a music device until my dying day. Make it only able to stream from Apple Music, make me load up songs through USB -- I'll do it.
I have a logitech mouse that allows you to unclick the scroll wheel so you can scroll at tremendous speed (the scroll wheel has a bearing). I highly recommend this both because it's surprisingly useful and because it's incredibly satisfying.
The only problem with this scroll wheel is that the clicked mode does not actually guarantee a scroll event per click. There is a disconnect between the mechanical click and the actual event sensor. This is usually a non issue but if you try to use the scroll up/down as a bind in a game (fps jump for instance) it becomes painfully obvious.
Oh and also scroll click isn’t a thing (but there is the middle button to bind)
For normal work I absolutely love the unlocked flywheel scroll and won’t go back
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The one that uses a semi-permanent magnet for that mechanism? It's the only use I'm aware of a switchable permanent magnet (alnico and rare earth half-cylinders wrapped in a coil; pulsing the coil switches the alnico to be either parallel or anti-parallel with the neodymium, turning the whole assembly on or off) in a commercial product; I bought it just for that.
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I had a Logitech MX master or sth like that and it had one of those. Too bad it was made like crap. I went through two of them in two years.
I use AHK to bind XB2 (the top side mouse button) + scroll to scroll fast, I agree that it is very useful. I got inspired by VS Code using alt+scroll for fast scroll and wanted that everywhere.
> I have a logitech mouse that allows you to unclick the scroll wheel
Yeah, I've had one for few years now. It was always annoying to accidentally unlock the scroll wheel...
> so you can scroll at tremendous speed (the scroll wheel has a bearing)
...but I never once gave the unlocked scroll wheel a whimsical flick until I read this part.
I learned a thing! It works great. Thanks!
I’ve used G502 mice for a decade now and the scroll wheel is central to how good they are. The MX Master mouse also has this but instead of a mechanical clickclack it has a button that switches an electropermanent magnet or something to enable/disable the free spin mode. It’s witchcraft.
The Onion has you covered https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
That's basically how Apple TV works and it drives me nuts.
And miss me with the "but you can use your iPhone", because that's exactly what is wrong with Apple products. I don't want an iPhone, and there is absolutely no technical reason to not have a better virtual keyboard or supporting non-Apple devices as remote controls.
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You may enjoy
https://www.innioasis.com/products/y1
which is loosely modeled on the iPod Classic. It doesn't have internet, though.
Once your music library gets to hundreds of artists and albums, scrolling through all that with a scroll wheel is so much slower than an interface where one can just type in a few characters and get the desired artist/album/song.
Just before Covid I got nostalgic for the iPod and got a used one and put in bigger storage and Rockbox, but it was precisely the cumbersomeness of the scrollwheel that caused me to give it up and go back to my phone.
Someone is working on a drop-in modern motherboard replacement for old iPods that will do all that:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xwB0ohq2xYk
We have evolved to iPhone dark pattern updating to suddenly starting Apple Music in my car bulldozing Spotify and me almost getting in a fucking car accident every time.
My car plays "Africa" by toto every time I plug in the iphone to charge. It was a trifling inconvenience, then over years it became rage inducing, and now it's reached all the way back around to funny.
It's not the phone deciding to do it, when the device connects the car is telling it to play. Check your infotainment settings to see if there's a way to turn it off.
Apple doesn't have an official way to prevent it, but I think you could do it with Shortcuts and an automation to pause music triggered by "When CarPlay is connected."
If it's tricky to get it to trigger at the exact time it starts playing, you could even do like:
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Mine was A-Punk by Vampire Weekend. Used to annoy me to no end, but it turned out it was a "feature" of the car stereo to just default to playing alphabetically. Buying a new car fixes that little issue. Easy!
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Reminds me of one of my favorite all time HN posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163667
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If I had to pick one tune to listen to every day, that wouldn’t be the worst one.
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Don't get me started with that U2 album I never purchased...
Buying a USB data blocker for your car fixes this issue.
That's a "feature" of the vehicle's infotainment system. Some of the vehicles I've driven run Music the moment I connect my phone. Others are more respectful and wait for me to tell them to play something.
The aftermarket CarPlay adapter I installed in our Toyota is in the latter group. When I climb into the car, the CarPlay UI pops up on the vehicle's screen, ready for me to ask it to do something. Until I do, it does nothing other than show the homescreen with icons on it. A Ford I rented would fire up Music the second I plugged my phone in.
At least on the android side, that's a setting. Not sure about the defaults though
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Have you tried “ A a a a a Very Good Song”?
It is 9 minutes of silence so that U2 album you never asked for doesn’t start playing at the most dangerous part of the journey.
Yes! "Aaron Burr, Sir" starts in Apple Music. "Hey, Siri shuffle liked songs on Spotify." Queue "Aaron Burr, Sir" again until I pick up my phone and tap Spotify. Make it stop.
Maybe.. but someone thought that this exact format is better for kids to listen to music / audio books / podcasts from, a device that doesnt need internet access, you download what you want and need. Some people also noted (I think it was this device havent tried it) you can open the device up and put in a new SD Card to increase capacity.
On a roadtrip I doubt this stops playing music…
https://storybutton.com/products/storybutton-one
It kind of lives on, on the Apple TV remote.
You know that ring around the main button, that kind of functions like a D-pad with four arrows?
If you're paused while watching something, you can drag your finger clockwise or counter-clockwise around the ring to seek forwards or backwards. It's really nice, much finer-grained control than normal skipping forwards or backwards.
The wheel doesn't actually spin, but it also doesn't really need to.
I’ve never seen it work except in first party apps. YouTube, plex don’t support it, maybe Jellyfin does but I don’t remember. I’m betting it comes down to whether you use the built-in frameworks for video playback or bring your own.
Yeah I'm aware it's hit-or-miss. But I use it in Infuse, which is a third-party app that supports it, even with its own framework.
And now that Plex laid off the entire player dev team, I guess we'll never get that feature :(
Its spiritual successor is the crown on the Apple Watch. I never swipe to scroll on the watch. It's way more fluid (and you get neat haptics) to twist the crown.
I've had my Apple watch for a very long and TIL you can turn the crown to scroll
Touchscreens didn't make physical controls lose their value. Their widespread use is just a result of a tradeoff for many product designers, where a satisfying experience just didn't outweigh the dominating factors.
Some car manufacturers are in fact reintroducing physical user control elements. After reevaluating the tradeoff decision so it seems.
I grew up with mp3 players with physical buttons for volume, next song etc., and texting on phones with a t9 dialpad.
In both cases I could achieve the task purely by touch, without looking at the screen. Compare with now where I routinely mistype characters even while looking at the screen!
I had a Gen 1 iPod with the physical, moving click wheel. It was amazing, and I remember the surprise I had when it would make that little piezo click on scroll. As the iPod aged, in my case around two years, I'd notice that my music was getting louder as I walked to class because the physical wheel was gaining momentum and scrolling. Luckily the iPod also had a hold switch.
extremely ironic comment considering there has been a Renaissance of personal music players lately, including ones with click wheels. look on Amazon for all the Chinese made ones. there is absolutely still a desire, perhaps a growing one, for dedicated devices, as everyone grows wearier of phones
Also as phone bans start up in various schools there are often carveouts for mp3 players. A lot of summer camps too that have no-device policies allow non-internet-connected music players as well. The market both on the super low end and the high end is looking pretty strong. Hardest aspect, from my perspective, is gaining access to downloadable music when most consumption has moved to streaming.
There are like a dozen apps that just record the audio out channel from your PC. Think of it as the modern version of recording songs off the radio
> Hardest aspect, from my perspective, is gaining access to downloadable music
Yt-dlp for the win
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That's actually great to hear, as my first reaction to the click wheel was "man I wonder if I can still get one of these".
Somehow, with all the world's music a tap away I listen to far fewer albums now. I loved preparing my mp3 players, like packing a bag for a trip.
I’m happy that I still have my 3rd gen and classic 120gig in black. Man these players where just the best.
I got myself a couple. A Mechen M30 and a FiiO M21. First one is pretty low-end in terms of interface and firmware capabilities, but both sound superb, and being able to listen music without a connection to somewhere and not interrupted by notifications.
I personally never gave up standalone players. My MD is still alive and kicking for example, but I find myself reaching for them more and more for proper music listening.
Not my project, but I recently found out about Sprout: https://certainthings.studio/sprout/
It's a modern iPod motherboard replacement that enables the device to have bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UI improvements, etc. Surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN
I am not sure it is necessarily people growing wearier of phones. It is kind of a mix of gen z's weird nostalgia for things they never grew up with and the proliferation of AI music. I have a hard time trusting random playlists on music services because I don't know if it is genuinely new music made by real people, or ai the platform is pushing so they can make more money. Either way I don't want to be part of that. I don't personally own one of these devices but my listening habits have changed quite a bit in the last year.
> gen z's weird nostalgia for things they never grew up
Plenty of older Gen Z grew up with iPods - the iPod touch didn't show up till they were 10 years old, and it took the smartphone another ~5 years to fully kill off that whole product category.
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For me it's about intention and decoupling core entertainment from algorithmic bs.
Do you think the renaissance is durable, or is it a fad? I wonder what percentage of high school kids are carrying a dedicated music player?
What is your favorite, easily wired or bluetooth loadable what ill call a personal audio playback and library device?
Zune
I wrote a UIKit widget that acts like the wheel part of the interface[0].
It's cool, but I've never been able to find a place for it, in my software. I think it works much better as a physical control.
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
My 2nd generation iPod stopped working last week. It had a spin wheel but its predecessor's actually spun.
The monochrome screen shows a folder icon with a warning sign. I haven't looked into it but I fear that something happened to the internal hard drive. It's one with spinning disks. It was truly a work of art, that device.
The HDD connector usually unseats slightly and it stops working. Pop it open with a credit card and reseat it. A more dangerous way that sometimes gets it working again is to wait for it not to be spinning and give the edge a good smack against palm of your hand. This usually works to reset it the tiny bit it needs…
I’m sorry to hear that your iPod might be bricked. I haven’t worked on an iPod gen2 personally, but I repaired an iPod mini. The interface for the small hard drive in that is the same as compact flash, so it’s very easy to replace the storage with something more physically durable. Or at least it is easy to find the replacement part - I haven’t tried the whole process on your iPod.
Honestly I'm amazed yours lasted this long. I had a fourth-gen 40GB iPod back in The Day and it was easily the least-reliable Apple product I ever owned due to that internal 1.8" HDD. Mine was replaced five times under AppleCare.
When that eventually ran out and it died again (in 2009 IIRC), I swapped in a CompactFlash card using a cheap adapter from DealExtreme. Once you do that or an SD card mod (more popular these days), have iTunes restore the partitioning scheme and OS and it'll be good to go.
The mechanical drive has probably failed. If you put the iPod in a freezer bag and get it very cold, it may spin up long enough for you to make a backup. But make sure it is in a freezer bag or something otherwise airtight or the condensation will brick it worse. The cold shrinks the metal enough to mitigate the initial friction of the drive spinning up.
From there, you can mod it to work from a micro SD card.
I feel like it’d make for a great interface for a physical controller for smart lights/speakers. I’ve got a Hue Tap Dial with a physically spinning wheel, but the click wheel would be great instead.
I’m half tempted to buy an old iPod and attempt to hack something together…
It's still the perfect interface for a dedicated music player
Yeah; I’m basically never going to upgrade from a BMW i3 because the i4’s jog wheel and UI was such a regression.
I guess I should be happy they saved me $10-100Ks, but it’s concerning that western engineering apparently peaked in the late 2010’s.
Customer needs and company needs are no longer aligned. The customer used to want the company to succeed in the long term. The company cares only about the next quarter.
One of the best and most elegant UX designs of all time. I can't think of anything that has beaten it since.
I’d like a ring with a wheel that clicks as a remote for something like glasses or a TV
Just the idea of that scratches my brain in a nice way.
Same with a lot of things. A synchromesh gearbox comes to mind. There's definitely something bittersweet about technology becoming obsolete and redundant.
I did not find pulling the wheel down to push the cursor up to be satisfying.
D-pad would be better, but somebody sacrificed functionality for aesthetics
Would... and was! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen
If they sold a modern "iPod Classic" with a clickwheel and headphone jack, there would be a small but devoted community.
If you're a trackball person, a lot of trackballs have a scroll ring that's similar to a click wheel. The Ploopy A+ has two discrete scroll wheels: https://ploopy.co/aplus/
I'm pretty partial to the Kensington Slimblade though. You scroll by twisting the ball itself - very satisfying once you figure out the technique. I hate the aesthetics (it looks kind of tacky) and the client software (bloated and buggy) but it's the only trackball I know of with this feature and I like it enough to put up with the issues. https://www.kensington.com/p/products/electronic-control-sol...
Lots of ‘phones’ have a camera wart on the back. Why not several other warts for additional functionality.
So long as it does effect the perceived thinness at the edges, I suppose.
The haptic trackpads on a Steam Controller use the same circling motion to perform scroll wheel actions, and the haptic feedback is superb at selling the effect both audibly and from the feeling on your thumb.
came here to say the same thing about the steam deck, the haptics on the trackpads are very satisfying
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